Catherine Frieman

Guardian headline: “Bob Carr, ‘a masterpiece’ and a hornet queer fantasy”

And this, kids, is why we need Oxford commas…

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity New study finds that plant biodiversity collapsed in landscapes where arable production was abandoned during and after the Black Death era.

@trisnorton.bsky.social : you'll be interested in this. Discussion of a pollen study showing the relationship between mixed farming and plant biodiversity, impacted negatively by population decline during the Black Death. All those weeds around the margins lost theconversation.com/the-black-de...

'Technology was never historically neutral....In the post-colonial context, the neutrality of an algorithm is a fiction. When we talk about AI in an African context, we are talking about who gets to define intelligence and whose data is harvested to feed it.' 2/2

In post-colonial Africa, the ethical neutrality of AI is pure fantasy If we treat AI as a purely rational evolution of human intelligence, we risk repeating colonial erasure on a digital scale, says Agnieszka Piotrowska

'conversations about AI sound fundamentally different in Africa....There, debates about technocratic issues such as innovation, productivity, regulation and “safety” – the anxieties of the designer and the proprietor – are inseparable from histories of extraction and epistemic violence.' 1/2

I well watch any adaptation or staging of much ado about nothing

I usually go with "Archaeologists study people-things. It's palaeontologists who do the dino stuff"

I think imposter syndrome is more insidious than mere self-doubt—I think some of us are expected to experience it as a form of humility. Reject that, fam. Know yourself, and, where appropriate, *trust yourself*.

Lise Meitner Excellence Program Since 2018, up to ten further Lise Meitner Groups will be advertised to recruit and promote exceptionally qualified female scientists as part of the new Lise Meitner Excellence Program.

"The position as a Lise Meitner Group Leader will be advertised to recruit and promote exceptionally qualified female scientists... The Lise Meitner Groups are furnished with their own resources for their entire duration." Sounds like a great opportunity. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩🏻‍🔬

Rockwell Kent’s Moby-Dick illustration

I reached out to the Plattsburgh State Art Museum to ask about using Rockwell Kent’s Moby-Dick illustrations for a fountain pen project.
They replied with wonderful news:

Incredible piece about digital archiving, in particular what does and does not get that treatment.

Lazy click bait journalism. You cannot reliably amalgamate results of a global survey when the views held by Gen Z men in different countries vary so widely. The combined number used in the article is meaningless for anything other than outrage and fuelling generational divisions.

Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers Carbonised food deposits preserved in pottery vessels, often termed ‘foodcrusts,’ are frequently encountered on hunter-gatherer-fisher (HGF) pottery throughout Northern and Eastern Europe. While lipid...

🏺

The developed cuisine of ancient hunter-gatherers in northern and Eastern Europe.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Moving petroglyphs and bulldozing roads to Native America sites.

The least dignified part of my incredibly off the rails phd viva was the 30 min fight with my external examiner (that i won) about semi-colon usage

I teach semicolons in comp not bc I expect students to suddenly use them constantly, but bc they should consistently consider how two related statements enter into a dynamic relationship when articulating a more complex thought. The semicolon isn’t necessary for the dynamic but does facilitate it.

Semicolons can’t become outdated because a semicolon isn’t a technology the way a VHS tape is. A semicolon is just a convenient notation for a form of grammatical relationship that appears in language when articulating ideas. Eliminating or changing the notation doesn’t obviate the relation.

Just saw a post dunking on semicolon placement as an outdated form of knowledge, and it’s honestly dispiriting at times trying to communicate how language works to people who don’t think the world exists as anything more than keys on a keyboard.

Older folks are constantly complaining to me about how young people don't use maps.
Of course, I tell them. What would a kid need a map for? We don't let them go anywhere.

If you love maps, exploring and childhoods that are full of adventure, independence and curiosity, we must protect mobility.

it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one

...nothing. Literally nothing. We already had this conversation when evopsych and data science tried to do "Big Data History" and we don't talk about it anymore for a reason. Guys. We're not idiots. Coding doesn't actually change every field every time it happens.

People who live in code overestimate how much of the world is digitized

I like the idea of a University of Bluesky in the sense that many of us are part of a virtual res publica litteraria these days. I haven't (and likely won't) meet all of you in person ever, but I read your research, hints, comments, problems, and puns, even your bad jokes.

Come work with me on the William & Mary Anthropology Collections! We're looking for a postdoc in North American archaeology, preferably with experience on collections. Apply by April 2 for full consideration. 🏺🗃️ #academicsky

logging off because nothing’s going to be better than this tonight

‘Complete joke’: Efforts to reduce funding wait times ends with longer blowout A long campaign to improve Australia’s sclerotic research bureaucracy has culminated in an extraordinary blowout to grant approval times, leaving scientists despondent.

“A complete joke”

After the starting gun fires, Australian researchers have to wait 2–3 years before even starting the race.

Really clear article explaining the impossibly long new time-frames for Australian Research Council grants.

By @liammannix.bsky.social

And yeah, I've been running through the color spectrum.

This meme template is my favourite niche archaeology debate meme template.

I'm going to add to this... A good and valuable literature review also makes an argument. It's not a summary of every paper ever, it's a selective discussion from a position of expertise that does specific field defining work

yeah, like...the point is not to *create* a literature review usually. there's so many published reviews on, say, the genomics of speciation that it's a little weird to think the goal is to publish yours, esp as a new student. but by *doing* it, you actually understand the field!